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This text examines the manoeuvres through which US partisans encoded the turmoil of antebellum America in terms of English affiliation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for southern and northern Americans, it locates sectionalism in a broader Atlantic context of cultural imagination and literary production.

Abstract:

This book examines the maneuvers through which U.S. partisans encoded the turmoil of antebellum America in terms of English affiliation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for southern and northern Americans, it locates sectionalism in a broader Atlantic context of cultural imagination and literary production.Read more...

Reviews

Editorial reviews

Publisher Synopsis

Recommended. * CHOICE * America's England is a trenchant, stunningly well-researched study. Hanlon is as adept at reading political, visual, and scientific commentary as he is at unpacking dense literary essays and ideologically fraught fiction. The book moves gracefully among such fields of inquiry as the economics of King Cotton, the threat and promise of telegraphic diplomacy, the social implications of the picturesque, and the pseudo-science of polygenesis. * Susan M. Ryan, author of The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence * America's England crucially contributes to Atlantic studies in its methodology and in its study of sectional self-fashioning in antebellum literature. Tracing the transatlantic Saxon/Norman discourses contradictorily crafted by northern and southern writers, and establishing the ways that transatlantic alliances provided leverage for a sectionalized national politics, especially regarding slavery, Christopher Hanlon offers a model for future work. America'sEngland reveals why the national and the transnational are best studied dialectically, as interdependent formations, ideologically and materially. * Laura Doyle, author of Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940 * When the long foreground of the American Civil War is recast on a transatlantic stage, Emerson plays an unexpected lead, first in celebrating and then in rebuking English example. America's England is a venturesome measure of Saxon villeins and Norman aristocrats, of picturesque priorities in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law, and of American liberty perpetually redefined. * Kathleen Diffley, editor of To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861-1876 * America's England is an ambitious, subtle account of the ways in which transatlantic engagements in the nineteenth century reflect back on the meaning and politics of sectional conflict before the Civil War. Christopher Hanlon commandingly shows how debates about America's future turned on strategic, and often fantastic, invocations of English character and history. It is an illuminating book on the surprisingly local effects of international ties. * Elisa Tamarkin, author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America * [This book] underscore[s] the vital importance of ... reading the American Civil War in all its genres and across its full duree, and of resisting the tendency to see the conflict as cisatlantic, rather than implicated in transatlantic and global modes of expression and exchange. * Elizabeth Duquette, American Literature * Indeed, it is Hanlon's welcome focus on the South, and the usefulness of his new term, Atlantic sectionalism, that will earn the book its place in the field of nineteenth-century American studies. * Joseph Rezek, Journal of American Studies *Read more...